Tour de France: Pogacar leaves the field behind on the Tourmalet and claims the yellow jersey
With a devastating attack on the legendary Col du Tourmalet and a descent at breakneck speed, the UAE Team Emirates world champion crossed the finish line alone, 2’40” ahead of the Dane Vingegaard
Et voilà. A fine bow at the finish line and a fond farewell to the peloton. What can we say? We’re lost for words. After just six stages, on the gruelling Pyrenean stage over the Tourmalet, Tadej Pogacar has dominated the Tour de France. He wins the stage, leaves his rival Vingegaard (+2’38”) and reclaims the yellow jersey, which had belonged for a single day to the Norwegian Traeen, who was swept aside by the Slovenian whirlwind that, yet again, has turned cycling’s old theories on their head.
Some might object: hold on, the Tour is still a long way off; there are 15 stages to go, and there’s still the time trial in Bergerac, not to mention the Massif Central and the Alps, with the Galibier and Alpe d’Huez to be tackled twice. Isn’t it a bit too early to make such a definitive judgement?
No, it isn’t. In different times, in a different world of cycling and with different protagonists, caution would have been the order of the day. With Pogacar – a champion who shatters every tactic and every hierarchy – one simply has to acknowledge that the Slovenian belongs in a league of his own. We’ve given him all sorts of nicknames: giant, Martian, alien, phenomenon, cannibal. These labels, now overused in sporting hyperbole, don’t quite do him justice. Even the comparison with the champion of champions, Eddy Merckx – the great ‘cannibal’ of the 1960s and 1970s – sounds outdated, definitively surpassed by Pogacar’s unbridled ambition. Tadej is never satisfied. He constantly raises the bar, attempting to challenge the unknown with attacks which, in a different era of cycling, would have been deemed senseless, defying all logic.
But with Pogacar, on his 23rd Tour victory, such talk doesn’t hold water. The word ‘caution’ is banished from his vocabulary. This time, alongside his team-mate Isaac Del Toro, he broke away some 43 kilometres from the finish line, right on the Tourmalet climb, 4.5 kilometres from the summit. In an instant, he threw the entire peloton of the favourites into disarray, as if a fierce wind had lashed the Tour’s legendary mountain.
Vingegaard, looking pale and with an unsettling grimace, began to lose seconds. But his collapse came after the top of the climb, first on the descent and then on the final climb to Gavarnie Gedre (18.7 km at 4%). The gap, initially 30 seconds, widened bend after bend, reaching over two and a half minutes.
